New Tool: USB Boot Tool October 28, 2010

Overview:

The purpose of the tool is to add/remove WinPE Boot.wim file(s) to a USB Flash Drive using a wizard.

It is designed to integrate with the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010.

Description:

It should be smart enough to find USB flash drives, find any local MDT 2010 Litetouch.wim files, automatically mark the drive/partition active (if not already set), and it can add/remove multiple *.wim files to a single USB Flash drive if there is enough space.

This is ideal if you want multiple Litetouch WIMs, For example x86 *and* x64 litetouch.wim files on the same USB stick, or Litetouch WIMs from multiple Deployment shares (One production server, one test server)..

USBootTool.hta is a standalone *.hta file, and requires no other components/libraries.

Installation/Operation:

· Just copy this script to your %deploymentshare%\Boot\ directory.

· When the script starts up it will display the Litetouch.wim files present on that directory. If not present it will enumerate through the Deployment shares mounted in the MDT console.

Screen Shots:

· Note the tool found my Flash Drive, parsed the BCD file and found three entries.

· I click “add” to add a *.wim file.

· Note that the tool found several *.wim files in my deployment share.

· I can modify the description if required.

· The script will copy all the necessary files to the Flash Drive.

· It will also place the *.wim file in a separate folder. The folder name is a GUID to prevent conflicts.

· I can repeat the process to add other *.wim files to my USB flash drive

Wow, I just have to say this is really, really awsome!! I spen weeks trying to make my first usb bootable drive and adding all these tools and menus to it. Reciently I tried to add MDT2010 scripts and they work but it won’t reboot automatically since there is a menu system that runs before litetouch.wsf runs. The other issue was working with 64bit and 32bit os’s too. This solved all those problems. I still have my tools image but now have litetouch x32 and x64 availble as alternatives.

I initially had problems running the tool from the \\server\deploymentshare and also when the previous was mapped to a drive letter. But when I ran it locally from a folder on my desktop with the two wim files I wanted to import, it worked correctly.

It does spend up to 3 minutes “working” with no sign of progress after the wim image is copied. It’s not a problem but I could see someone getting impatient and thinking it has crashed.